


Pacific Rim in Space

by bat_country



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Space, Gen, Non-Human Hermann Gottlieb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 13:22:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1120314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bat_country/pseuds/bat_country
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>because I'm that great with titles. </p><p>Just a short Pacific Rim in Space AU mostly focused on Newt, where the Shatterdome is a spaceship cruising the galaxy, hoping to stop the kaiju attacks. The team is looking for the Breach, through which kaiju come and attack the Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pacific Rim in Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jade (the-oxford-english-fangirl) from tumblr!](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Jade+%28the-oxford-english-fangirl%29+from+tumblr%21).



> There was a simple fandom meme on tumblr, and I gave **[the-oxford-english-fangeek](http://the-oxford-english-fangeek.tumblr.com/)** the question "Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)". 
> 
> It doesn't perfectly match her description, but I tried, and therefore, this is totally dedicated to her! 
> 
> This was the response:
> 
> " _AUS ARE MY CRACK. DO NOT GIVE ME FREE REIGN TO START COMING UP WITH THEM BECAUSE I GENUINELY STRUGGLE TO STOP AND THEN I GET SAD BECAUSE NONE OF THEM ARE BEING WRITTEN AND I WANT THEM ALL SO BAD. *cough* That is to say_  
>  PacRim in space - I’m thinking a vaguely Firefly vibe, mostly because motley crews who are each others family is my jam. Captain Stacker Pentecost and his crew, resistance fighters taking on the alien threat, not santictioned by the government but fighting the good fight. First mate Herc Hansen, old war buddies with Stacker, his son Chuck provides some much needed muscle and if you get past the dickish tendencies is actually quite the strategist. The ships engineer Mako is some kind of prodigy and keeps them in the air, her and the pilot Becket have got some kind of thing going on. Then there’s the ships doctor/alien expert Newt who’s a total genius but also kinda cracked especially considering the way he’s constantly having arguments with the ships AI HERMANN who he is in no way trying to construct a body for..."
> 
> and all of a sudden I had to write something and I just sort of blahblahblahed this whole thing at 3am and this isn't proofread or anything really. Sorry about the clunky exposition. I just ask that you don't take this too seriously. Enjoy!

 

Captain Stacker Pentecost was giving Newton Geiszler The Look again – the one where Newt couldn’t tell whether or not he was a mixture of amused and frustrated, or just plain frustrated.

 

“I’ll say one thing about your maverick methods, Dr. Geiszler: they haven’t failed us yet,” Pentecost finally said.

 

Newt breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you, sir. I’ll keep the tests running.”

 

First Mate Herc Hansen, who stood by the Captain’s side, shook his head. He muttered in a low voice that only the Captain could hear, “I could’ve sworn that amount of data processing would be too much for the ship’s system to handle, but I gotta hand it to the little guy. It’s actually working.”

 

Herc was referring to the system that Newt had set up for running multiple algorithms at once using all of the ship’s computers. “All it is is simplified distributed computing. It’s just like SETI At Home!” Newt had explained excitedly during one of their group meetings a couple of months ago. “See, this program would’ve drained the main processor in just under a couple of days. But by rerouting this so that everything gets evenly distributed, we can analyze all of our data simultaneously, continuously – even while we sleep! – until we get a hit and find the location of the Breach!”

 

“Well, just let us know as soon as you have something,” said Pentecost, as he and Herc turned to leave the K-Science wing of the Shatterdome.

 

Their spaceship, the Shatterdome, sped on as Newt nodded and returned to his dissection. The computers hummed in the background, constantly analyzing the data that could help them find the Breach – that unusual wormhole that Earth’s scientists had predicted _had_ to exist, through which the kaiju were sent to attack the planet. Those seemingly mindless beasts had been sent to the Earth for just shy of a decade now, ostensibly by another race of precursors intelligent enough to be capable of spaceflight. No one on Earth knew these Precursors’ agenda, or what they wanted – only that they used kaiju to do their dirty work.

 

The Shatterdome’s last battle was a little too close for comfort, having entered Earth’s orbit as they used the Striker Eureka jaeger to combat Mutavore. Though they were triumphant, they lost their pilot, and Captain Stacker Pentecost knew exactly who he wanted to recruit to take his place.

 

“New guy, huh?” Newt said brightly to the young man who entered the K-Science wing.

 

“Yeah. Raleigh Becket. Nice to meet you,” said Raleigh, as the two shook hands.

 

“Well, good to have you aboard. I hear good things about you from the Captain,” Newt said. “Let’s get that checked out,” Newt said, nodding his head towards the large cut across Raleigh’s shoulder, who had come fresh out of battle himself.

 

“I do all my medical stuff next door. Don’t want kaiju guts getting into my scalpels or anything, right? Haha!”

 

“Yeah, what _is_ the deal with the kaiju guts around here?” Raleigh asked.

 

“I’m the kaiju expert around here, guy!” Newt said, waving a hand towards the dissection table. “I don’t just take people’s temperatures, I got a _lot_ of stuff on my plate here. Now come on. Let’s walk and talk.”

 

Once the two of them were next door, Newt took out a mechanical arm that swung out from the wall of the medical bay and pointed the camera at the end at Raleigh’s shoulder. “Look at that, HERMANN,” Newt said. “See if there’s anything worth noting while I get out my kit, because I gotta stitch him up.”

 

A beam of light shone from the camera and traced up and down the cut. A few seconds later, some text appeared on the screen on the wall. It read, “Showing signs of infection. Prescribe antibiotic regimen.”

 

After glancing at the screen, Newt waved a hand dismissively at it and said, “Yeah, yeah, I was gonna, anyway!” Raleigh just stared.

 

“What about the rest of the kaiju stuff we were working on today?”

 

More text appeared on the screen. “The Yamarashi lung tissue sample from the cleanup crew was too degraded, but fortunately, the good people of CSU Long Beach packed the liver in enough dry ice for us to be able to extract RNA from it. You should be able to run your q-PCR by tonight.”

 

“Sweet. Thanks!” Newt said out loud.

 

As Newt proceeded to clean the wound and begin stitching it up, Raleigh finally said, “Are you talking to the ship’s HERMANN?”

 

“Yup.”

 

“And it can do stuff like that? I thought the HERMANN was just a simple messaging system! Isn’t it like, Home Entertainment Relay Messaging… something, something,” Raleigh trailed off, since he’d forgotten the acronym.

 

“I know, it sounds a little forced,” Newt said with a smile. “And yeah, the HERMANN _was_ just a simple system that people have in their homes to set their Crock-Pots on remotely or they tell it to set their TV show recordings or whatever. But _ours_ isn’t. This one’s special.  I modified it. Initially it was just so that it could run the Breach algorithm, because the standard HERMANN can’t handle that much data processing. But I’ve since modified it even more. It’s great,” Newt explained. He couldn’t help beaming a little, and secretly relished there being a new guy on board so that he could talk about HERMANN all over again.

 

“Really?” Raleigh said, with a bit of surprise in his voice. “And what’s with all the kaiju research, anyway?”

 

“What? What do you mean?”

 

“I mean – we’re just going to blow them pieces, aren’t we?”

 

Newt stopped stitching. “You’re kidding, right? Knowledge is power, man. I bet you didn’t even realize that a ton of useful updates to Striker Eureka’s operating system were written by HERMANN. And _that_ was based off data we got by studying kaiju remains. Studying those helped us figure out what would be a more efficient way for the jaegers to fight them.”

 

There was a sudden beep. Raleigh and Newt both turned to read the text that appeared on the screen. “To fight the kaiju, we must understand them and how they work, Mr. Becket.”

 

Raleigh raised an eyebrow at Newt. The AI knew his name already.

 

“There. You’re all set,” Newt said, patting Raleigh’s stitched-up arm, which caused Raleigh to wince.

 

“I sure hope you made that thing Three Laws compliant,” Raleigh said with a shake of his head as he sauntered out of the medical bay.

 

One month later, Newt was frantically throwing sample jars into a bag while Raleigh and the ship’s engineer, Mako, were screaming at him to leave everything behind. The ship rattled and shook as it took another hit, and a couple of jars fell off the shelves of the K-Science wing and shattered.

 

“Come _on_ , Newt! You’ll get more samples later! These kaiju won’t stop! Just leave those!” Raleigh shouted.

 

“All right, all right!” Newt screamed, tossing the bag aside. He suddenly realized that there was one thing on the ship that couldn’t be replaced. He found a hard drive to plug into the wall and began to type frantically into the ship’s computer.

 

“Newton, _run_!” yelled Mako. “The escape pods are already about to go!”

 

“I can’t just – I have to do something first, just go on and I’ll catch up, okay?!”

 

“We can’t leave you behind,” Mako pleaded. 

“Well, you have to! I’ll be right there!”

 

As the ship continued to shake, Raleigh shook his head sadly at Mako and said, “We’re just gonna have to run.”

 

Inside the escape pod, Captain Pentecost shot Raleigh and Mako a bewildered look. “Where’s the doctor?!”

 

“He said he’s coming,” Raleigh said.

 

“You were supposed to get him!” Chuck, the other pilot, yelled angrily.

 

“He wouldn’t leave!” Mako said.

 

Herc shook his head. “We can’t wait. There are too many kaiju, they’ll swarm the ship in no time.”

 

The captain stared straight ahead. “The first mate is right. We can’t wait. Start the escape pod engines.”

 

“But… but the whole system will shut down in there!” Raleigh sputtered.

 

“It’s going to be dark in there. It’s going to be dark in there!” Chuck shouted ominously.

 

For once, the two pilots, Raleigh and Chuck, who so often were at odds, were now in agreement. Neither wanted to say out loud that Newt was going to die if they left him alone.

 

Newt pounded his fist on the screen impatiently, waiting for his modified HERMANN program to be saved externally. He should’ve done this before. Other Shatterdome ships had been destroyed; he should’ve anticipated this. But HERMANN kept changing and evolving so much that one version he saved externally would no longer be relevant the next day. Newt guessed that’s why he never bothered.

 

Loud crashes could be heard as the kaiju continued their assault on the Shatterdome. Things fell over, and Newt narrowly dodged a falling bookcase as the lights flickered. Then, suddenly, everything went dark, and the humming of all of the machines on the ship slowly faded into silence.

 

“Oh, man. This is the worst,” Newt groaned, as he sank to the floor. The kaiju had stopped ramming into the ship, but that was because they had been successful in disabling it.

 

Newt sat on the floor of the K-Science wing, and shoved his hands underneath his black-rimmed glasses to bury his face. He sighed into the total darkness.

 

There was a click. A soft light suddenly appeared from the wall that contained the hard drive, and the familiar humming of a machine starting up could be heard. “Newton,” said a voice that Newt did not recognize.

 

“What?! Who said that?” Newt shouted, suddenly bolting to an upright sitting position.

 

“Newton, the residual oxygen in the ship is enough for the moment, but you’re going to die in minutes if the auxiliary life support systems are not turned on. I’ll need you to grant me access to them so that I can do so,” the voice continued in a very proper-sounding British accent.

 

“What’s going on?!” Newt demanded.

 

“The ship’s main life support system has been badly damaged by the kaiju attack. I need you to grant me access –“

 

“I heard that part! And I figured out the other part about the main life support system pretty well on my own, thanks! You know, what with the giant monsters slamming into our ship every two seconds, and all, it really took a _genius_ like me to figure out that the life support systems were down! It made it even _harder_ to figure that out when the lights went out, but –“

 

“Newton, do you really want your last words to be sarcastic?”

 

“ _Noooooooooooooooooo_!” Newt screamed with an unnecessary amount of sarcasm. 

 

“Newton, just key in the access code on the panel over to your left.”

 

“Ugh. Fine!” Newt said, finally standing and feeling his way over to the panel. He punched in the security code, and said, “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

 

“Newton, it’s HERMANN.”

 

Newt was finally stunned into silence.

 

“I know you’re still there, Newton. I can read your very familiar biometrics coming from you. Please answer me.”

 

Newt did not answer, as he could not yet accept that something had just passed the Turing test.

 

“I’ve turned the auxiliary life support and power on,” HERMANN said. Sure enough, the lights flickered back on little by little.

 

After another beat of silence, HERMANN said, “I’m going to get you out of this.” 

**Author's Note:**

> In addition to being inspired by the-oxford-english-fangirl's AU idea (of course), this was also heavily inspired by the game "The Nightjar." But, hey, you'll notice that HERMANN turns the lights on immediately, so that was kind of my way of forcing myself not to rip it off _completely_ should this thing ever continue. Heh. [shrug]


End file.
